Bartering is the process of obtaining goods or services by direct exchange without the use of currency. In times of economic instability or currency devaluation, it can be a great way to ensure the flow of necessary items and services into your household without using precious funds. Historically, face-to-face exchanges between familiar parties were most common, but the Internet has opened up a new medium for bartering opportunities for both person-to-person exchanges and third-party facilitated transactions.
In the United States, Karl Hess used bartering to make it harder for the IRS to seize his wages and as a form of tax resistance. Hess explained how he turned to barter in an op-ed for The New York Times in 1975.[31] However the IRS now requires barter exchanges to be reported as per the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. Barter exchanges are considered taxable revenue by the IRS and must be reported on a 1099-B form. According to the IRS, "The fair market value of goods and services exchanged must be included in the income of both parties."[32]
I see a LOT of potential when it comes to locally owned businesses but it’s really a shame to see them open the beginning of May and by November they’re already closed (and they’re in locations I’d LOVE to be at when things start taking off – Dundas between Jarvis and Mutual for example) – same old crap still comes and goes though. Bartering doesn’t mean you’re being taken or taking someone ‘for a ride’ – it’s how small town downtowns survive and in many ways we can learn from that. When a customer likes what you provide they trust your judgment and are likely to check out that juice bar two doors down if you’re promoting it. The key to get back our stable neighbourhoods – I’m looking at us, Downtown East – is the commitment to hanging in there and helping each other out. When you’re doing your own business you know it’s not just a 40 hour workweek – it’s all the time. Any chance we can take to promote not just our business but what we love doing…as well as being happy to see neighbouring businesses do well…makes all this hard work worth it.

She was about to quit the project when she received a cascade of good news: six new women signed up as Barter Babes, more than she’d ever had before at one time. Then City Television contacted her for an interview segment—one of her Barter Babes had mentioned her trade to a friend at the station. After that, social media mentions of Barter Babes blew up.

Financial planners often recommend that people dedicate 30 per cent of their after-tax cash flow to fun spending—yet rising costs can now make that number seem unrealistic. To alleviate some of the squeeze, Simmons suggests evaluating what, out of that 30 per cent, can instead be attained through barter. By bartering for clothes, aesthetics and fitness, she’s able to eke out at least five per cent cash savings a month. Those unspent dollars go straight into her savings account.
But various anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe. “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

Economic historian Karl Polanyi has argued that where barter is widespread, and cash supplies limited, barter is aided by the use of credit, brokerage, and money as a unit of account (i.e. used to price items). All of these strategies are found in ancient economies including Ptolemaic Egypt. They are also the basis for more recent barter exchange systems.[17]

In late 2012, Toronto even got its own spinoff of Trade School, a model that originated in New York in 2010. The Toronto Trade School holds classes—on anything from spoken word to origami flower–making to bicycle maintenance—and invites students to “pay” with an item or service from the teacher’s barter wish list. It has hosted more than 70 classes.

Since the 1830s, direct barter in western market economies has been aided by exchanges which frequently utilize alternative currencies based on the labor theory of value, and designed to prevent profit taking by intermediators. Examples include the Owenite socialists, the Cincinnati Time store, and more recently Ithaca HOURS (Time banking) and the LETS system.